Identify the critical information needed to develop a product and brand strategy that generates both quick-wins and long-term value. By completing this course, you will be in position to create an activity plan to bring your brand strategy to life - both externally towards consumers and internally to employees. You will be able to define the right metrics for determining success in the implementation of your product and brand strategy, considering any adjustments that may need to be made under a test and learn methodology.
Luis Rodriguez Baptista - a professor at IE University and Marekting Consultant - will guide you through six modules that look at first understanding the challenge of managing products through their 'life-cycle' and culminates with learning how to equip your employees with knowledge of how to deliver on your brand promise. The course features interviews with consumer and industry professionals, which help illustrate the importance of brand strategy.
Brand and product management is a unique course which enables you to first understand the importance of brand and product management and then use brand development, architecture and portfolios, in order to achieve success.

Ministrado por

Luis Rodriguez Baptista

Professor

Transcrição

[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. In the last lecture we calculated the demand for your product. The focus of this lecture, is for your to learn the fundamentals of developing and launching new products. Instead of providing you with a guided process, which may not apply to you because of the nature of your industry. I will give you my key success factors to launching and developing new products. I assume that after lecture 1.3, you have defined your product strategy. So, before sharing these factors, let me ask you some questions that you should think about. Who is the target of your new product? What specific need of these target customers will your product satisfy? Which specific benefits should the new product have? How will you market and sell the new product? How will you manage costs to develop a profitable new product without cannibalizing others in your product mix? When is the best time to expand a product line, and with what strategy? How should your organization respond to similar competitive products? How should my company organize their pipeline of new products? As you can see, this list is very comprehensive and you should make sure that you have answered the above. Before you over commit to your new product. Some of these, I will answer in this lecture, and some in the next lecture. Which is about your product pipeline. Let's begin with the first success factor. In my experience, it's crucial to listen to the consumer along the way. Keep in touch with the market place. Although this sounds obvious, companies don't always keep open ended conversations with customers or potential customers. For example, identify who are the early adapters and risk takers, allows you to know the evolution of their needs and where are the gaps. Sharing with them the information. Asking them questions, such as, what will help you achieve your objectives. Or what are your cost constraints? What are the desired features, what are the redundant features? Will actually help you fine tune your product. Successful companies also talk to the distribution channels to understand their perspective and their needs. Market research is crucial to measure the interaction between potential customers and concepts or prototypes. But it is important that the market research be relevant and open versus confirming. What does this mean? It means that it arrives on time, to actually make decisions and now after. It means that it's rich in facts to make a relevant decision. For example, that it helps to estimate the cannibalization of existing products. It means that it doesn't document what is obvious. For example, that consumers want the best quality at the least price. It also means, that it's not to confirm a point of view that we already have. That it is specific and non standardized. And that it takes into consideration, the functional needs of all of your team whether it's RD or marketing or production. Listening to consumer can also be done by developing prototypes that you can test and learn. Your prototypes might not be perfect but they will allow you to learn what customers appreciate most and least. What attributes they missed. The feedback helps your developers reconcile the desired features with the constraints of time and cost. Building a prototype also has the added benefit of getting all the internal stake holders excited and energized about of your product. That leads to my second success factor, getting everyone onboard, including those areas or functions not directly involved with the development process. And do it early on, if possible, from the project's launch. I will illustrate why this is important with a simple example. While working for a real estate company, the team had developed a whole set of customization options for the new homes, that would be soon launched. After having the models ready and the personnel trained to sell these features. The development team approached IT and accounting to communicate these new options. As it turned out, their internal system did not have enough "feels" to capture the customization options, or even to invoice them. The necessary changes in programming and testing would cost a three month delay in the launch of the new product. Which meant Hundreds of thousands of dollars. As you can see, something that seemed unrelated to the product could set back your launch and add to your costs. My third success factor, is to set specific go-no go milestones with specific decision-making criteria and stick to them. I will illustrate this point with an example of my own experience as an entrepreneur. Some years back, I purchased a rights to an American franchise to open up stores in Spain. Having a well-thought out business plan, we had to find the key premises for each store to be profitable. One of the premises was the highest amount we could pay as a rent for where the stores would be. And also the traffic footfall, the amount of persons that we need to pass in front of our store everyday. In this line of business, the most difficult task was to get the retail space. After visiting all shopping mall owners, realtors, et cetera. We were eagerly awaiting to find something to open up. After some months, we finally got a call from a major mall owner, offering a space in his new mall. Next to Carford and Ikea, we were amazed. How lucky could we be? However the price was 30% more than our business plan and the conditions required a significant up front cash payment. Despite having a go-no go milestone and a criteria for deciding on locations. We let the best or our hype on gut make the decision, launching the first store in this mall. It proved to be a disaster. At the beginning, we could not sell enough product to pay the rent. As we began to sell more and get acceptance of our product, the footfall of the mall decreased. And thus our sales went down. At the end, we had to close down within 18 months of opening. My fourth success criteria, when launching your products are to consider the competitive advantages of your organization. For example, is your company small and with a flat structure? Then one of the advantages that you may have, is that you communicate very well and can make joint decisions very quickly. How can you incorporate this in your product launch? Maybe defining a plan for monitoring the launch. And a system to make quick changes in pricing, in promotion, in features, etc. That will allow you to test and learn. Let me share another example. I work with a company that makes products for body shops. But they don't sell directly but rather through distributors. However, this company, who had a technical team which visits body shops regularly. To help the owners get the most out of the product. These visits allow them to capture lots of customer insight that could provide a competitive advantage to the company. But how can the user would launch in your product? Well, beyond the obvious which is feeding back the needs that could be the seed of new products. They can also help in developing grade value propositions for the both the distribution and the body shop. They can be the door openers for the new products. They can also through their job of training. They can facilitate the quick adoptions of the new products, etc. On the other hand, you should also include in your product action plans, how to develop the capacities needed for the launch. Which are those critical competencies to reach our objectives? Which ones are the nice to have? I think the best case is to illustrate this our software companies. How many times they have launched a software addressing a mainstream consumer. And they dont' have the support hotline to help you navigate through them or answer questions. It is also very common in the Telco Industry, where they might launch a new plan. But nobody has been trained to activate it in their systems. The fifth success factor is to generate a business case, that summarizes the concept's viability. We also look at the new product in the context of the company financials, and not as a standalone business. Well, if it is to be sustainable, we should definitely evaluate what other resources that it requires. And develop a model with scenarios from pessimist to optimist. We should even do a stress test, and evaluate the organizational capacities and competencies required for success. To ensure that we are able to deliver them within our model cost structure. Think of it. If we're a start-up, a new product might eat up all of our resources. And at least we should be aware of the parameter of the risk that we're taking. There are many other factors to consider when developing and launching of new products. There is much written about it. I have shared with you, those that I consider, in my experience, are critical for success. Before I go, I want to share with you another crucial element to consider. Which is how you organize your product launches, so you can maximize the return of each of your products. This is the topic of our next lecture. See you then. [MUSIC]